ALIEN - COVENANT

Anybody who knows me will be familiar with how much I hated/continue to hate Prometheus.

The original Marmite film where you either loved it or hated it (just to clarify if you loved it then you’re wrong as it is incredibly fucking shit) sucked you in with its early marketing campaign and Sir Ridley ‘once responsible for amazing films’ Scott was banging a drum about how it would not be an Alien prequel at all, that it would share the same universe and have hints along the way as to being related to his original masterpiece…with a stellar cast involved it couldn’t fail, but it did and as I said before (and may do a few more times yet) it was shit.

So to say I wasn’t enthusiastic about Alien Convenant was putting it mildly, in all honesty I couldn’t have given a flying intergalactic shit about how much more Ridley was disappearing up his own asshole, but I thought i’d give it a whirl and went in with a total 100% open mind.

I settled into it quite well and again it was boasting an impressive cast and straight away I was kinda able to differentiate each character from the other, don’t get me wrong I couldn’t name any of them now after only watching it 2 hours ago so they wasn’t as memorable as Ripley, Ash, Dallas, Kane, Lambert, Brett or Parker but they definitely had more staying power than the cannon fodder Star Trek red shirts that were in Prometheus, but hey ho!

The visuals were flipping amazing and some of the scale shots in space or when landing looked great…usual story of crew waking from cryosleep, answer a distress call, go and investigate, the shit hits the fan and the kill factor ramps up and some of the kill scenes were pretty darn cool!

However having been hoping for the approx 1 million unexplained things from Prometheus to actually get answered this time round I was left disappointed at none of them actually being addressed or in places alluded too. Instead you get David the android being a sulky knob head with daddy issues so he fucks around with that black goo stuff (that still never gets explained who, what, were or why) and makes aliens somehow.

It was weird to watch what seemed like 3 different films stitched together with a wafer thin narrative…it still stunk of Ridley Scott trying to put some deep & meaningful reasoning about how the Alien was created along with a mad professor type of film by Hammer Horror along with the really obvious bits from the preceding films tagged on as if “oh lets just bung this in for everyone who moaned about no aliens in Prometheus”…

Final verdict: There doesn’t need to be some overblown, pretentious backstory to anything regarding the Alien films…why Ridley Scott seems intent on doing this is beyond me and the most disappointing thing is that as he is saying how he has another 2 or 3 sequels to make now means that Neil Bloomkamps Alien film which would have carried on events directly after Aliens (and would have included Ripley, Hicks & Newt!) has now been shelved in favour of more toilets from Sir Scott!

1.5 chestburtsers out of 5

​Chris Massey

ALIEN COVENANT will be released on DVD , Blu Ray and Digitally on 18th September